Sarah Rhea Werner:
This is the Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner episode 146, “My Top 10 Tools for Writing.”

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Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers: aspiring, professional, and otherwise to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and if you’ve been listening to this show for a long time, you might be like, “hey Sarah, you’ve already done an episode about your favorite writing tools.” To which I may respond, “why, yes I have, but it was way back in 2015.” <laugh> Which at this point is many years ago and things have changed since then. I know I’ve expressed a little bit of anxiety here before about repeating myself or retreading things that I’ve already said, but I think that the change is significant enough that it warrants yes, an entire new episode. So I’m really excited to share this with you today. I’ve been refining my process. Well, since before I started this podcast back in 2014… 15… Whenever. (That’s one of those, those things that I should just know) And I have found a lot of things that work and a lot of things that don’t work.

As usual, I wanna start this off with the caveat that what works for me will not necessarily work for you, and what works for you does not necessarily work for me, or anyone else. So please keep anything I say in this episode, in your mind, as a possibility and not necessarily prescriptive or a guarantee that if you adopt my 10 favorite tools for writing, you will suddenly become the writer you’ve always dreamed of being. Tools can’t do that, only you can do that. But tools can help. And if you take away even just one of these 10 tools that I’m going to talk about today, then I’ve done a pretty okay job.

The first tool on my personal list is a journal. And I know that the second I say the word “journal,” I’m going to turn a lot of people off. There are a lot of divisive topics among us writers, or is it “we” writers – from plotting versus pantsing, to how we get paid, to, perhaps surprisingly, the practice of journaling. I discussed my own practice of daily journaling back in episode 102, called “Daily Journaling”, which I recorded back in 2020. And since then, I’ve noticed a really interesting response from other writers, no matter what stage of writing they’re at, when I talk about a journaling practice. Every once in a while, I’ll come across a writer who really enjoys journaling or who has read “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, and has started doing the practice of morning pages and found value in those, but – the majority of writers I talk to… And maybe I’m just friends with a lot of outlier fringe writers, but the writers that I talk to – their hackles get raised. When I talk about journaling. They’ll say, “oh, journaling’s not for me.” Or, “I’ve tried journaling.” Or, “I’ve tried keeping a journal and it just didn’t work.” And then there’s folks who get aggressive about it, like talking about a journaling practice shuts them down and they’re just done.

So I wanna say right off the bat: journaling is not for everyone and that’s okay. It might not be for you. And you might have some very deep-seated issues with the practice of journaling. I know a very common argument is, “I don’t have enough time in my day to work on my passion project; whether that’s a memoir or a piece of fiction, a set of poems, why would I set aside time in the morning, or whenever, to write words that do not go into my total word count for my passion project?” And it’s a great argument. If you are the type of writer who is living a creative life where you have maximum 30 minutes a day to yourself to write, you might not want to use those 30 minutes writing in your journal. It might not be the best or most effective use of your creative time.

I think a lot of the pushback to journaling comes from an interaction with a sort of finger wagging mentor or teacher at some point along the way, who has said, “well, if you want to be a good writer, you have to journal.” Or worse, “if you want to be a writer, you should journal.” Journaling is also not very often defined. And I know when I started journaling, I really didn’t know what I was doing a hundred percent. And so I would essentially do like, “dear your diary yesterday, I did this, and today I’m doing this,” and it did not feel helpful and I did not see any benefit in this practice. If you reference Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way”, which has a sort of different spin on the art of journaling, where you sit down every morning and you just take all of the thoughts and subconscious worries and anxieties and hopes, and you just put them down on the page to get them out of your brain, sort of purge them onto the page, so that you can move forward into your writing with clarity – and so that you can look back at any insights that you’ve had, or struggles that you’ve had, for future inspiration for your writing.

There’s not a right way or a wrong way to journal. And I think that’s where some more – maybe resentment or resistance to journaling comes from is maybe a writer has been told in the past, “oh, you’re doing it wrong.” There is <laugh>, there is no faster way to get me to stop doing something than to tell me I’m doing it wrong. I will just throw up my hands and say, “fine, then you do it.” Or I’ll get defensive and say, “hey, I’m just trying my best.” And I think that if you want to start a journaling practice and have it actually be effective, you need to understand what you want to get out of that journaling practice and what would make it valuable and worthwhile for you.

It can be whatever you want it to be, and it can be whatever you need to be helpful. It can be those three full stream of consciousness morning pages that Julia Cameron recommends. It can be a half of one page. It can be a series of lists. It can be you just joting down how you’re feeling. Or if you have a particular thought, that’s eating away at your brain and you need to explore it. You can journal every day. You can journal once a week. You can journal never, ever, ever. But if you’re interested in journaling, I want you to find a way to journal in a way that serves you. And that does not feel like it’s taking away from your creative energy. And again, if you decide not to do it, that is completely fine. That is completely valid.

Okay, I’m going to go on to the next tool right now because this episode’s gonna end up being like two hours long if I keep going at this pace. Second on my list is “some sort of idea repository”. For me., this takes the form of a little notebook that I carry around for each project that I’m working on. But for you, you know, it could be a notebook. It could be an app. It could be even just some sticky notes; but this is a place, and it’s project specific at least for me – again, I don’t wanna be prescriptive or dictate how you do this, but for me, it’s been very useful to have, for each individual project I’m working on, a little notebook where I write sudden flashes of inspiration that I may not be ready to incorporate into the project yet, or just as I’m in the brainstorming phase, it’s a really helpful place to write down what I’m excited about happening in the story. This could include strong images that I want to include, an emotional scene that I want to add in. It could be thoughts, images, phrases, names like, “oh, I just thought of a great name for a villain and it’s this. And I wanna use it in this project.”

This is really helpful for me because I’m the kind of writer that if I don’t write something down, when it pops into my head, it will disappear. <laugh> I know writers who can hold onto their ideas. And I am just in awe of them. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. I need, well, at this point now I’ve got my journal and an idea notebook. So I’m carrying around… well, actually I’m carrying around more than two notebooks ’cause I’ve got my journal, but then I have a little idea notebook for each one of my projects. And so currently in my purse right now, I have my idea notebook for “Girl in Space”. I have an idea notebook for the sort of gentle horror audio drama that I’m sort of in the midst of brainstorming and stewing on. And then I also have a little notebook that I’m carrying around for the novel that I’m supposed to be writing. And I haven’t started yet. More on that later <laugh> but I keep these distinct from my journal. My journal is my own thoughts; my own creative journey. It’s the feelings I’m dealing with. Sometimes that will inspire an idea that will then go into one of my idea notebooks, but largely the journal is about me and the idea notebooks are about my ideas for my projects.

At this point, you may be like, uh, Sarah is every single one of these tools going to be a notebook of some kind. And I can confidently say “no.” <Laugh> Because the third item on the list is a pack of index cards. Now, “hey, wait a minute, Sarah,” you may be saying, “a pack of index cards is basically just a notebook, but without the binding around one edge” and you are not wrong, <laugh> but I’m counting this as a separate tool because it is a separate tool and it all comes down for me in the way that I use it again.

If you’ve been listening to this show for a while, you may remember episode 95 of “The Write Now Podcast” called, “Sarah Tries Outlining” in which I experiment with outlining. I recorded that episode in 2020. Basically, when I’m ready to start a quote-unquote “project” by which I mean, I am ready/not really ready, but: I’m to begin sort of formally putting a project together. What I will do is I’ll go through the idea notebook that I’ve been carrying around maybe for six months or a year or two years or ten years at this point. And I will go through it and transfer all of the images and scenes and anything else that feels important and pertinent to building the story. I’ll transfer each one of those ideas onto an index card. I feel like for me, this tool allows me to process the ideas in my idea notebook and sort of tangibly rearrange them; see how ideas fit together, see, “oh, does this scene feel right coming before this scene? Or should I move it here?” This is one of those parts of my writing process that I think is, I don’t know if it’s unique to me – you know, I really hesitate to say that. If you’re a writer who uses index cards for this purpose, let me know. I’m actually really curious to see who else benefits from this. But I started doing this as a way to process my own thoughts and ideas in a way that worked for me.

I have realized <laugh> over the past many, many, years that I understand information better when it’s presented to me in certain ways. And you might be like this too, or maybe I’m just a huge weirdo. <laugh> I don’t know. I’ve realized that I have a lot of difficulty writing things on a screen and having to scroll back and forth, especially if I feel like those things are locked into place in a linear fashion. So again, not a prescriptive thing, but if this sounds like something that would be helpful to you, I have found it is not just helpful, but necessary for me in working with the ideas that I’ve put down in my idea notebook.

Now, index cards and sort of as a subset of index cards, sticky notes, are a fantastic tool for a lot of different applications for writers. So you don’t just have to use it for this purpose. I’ve also found index cards useful for plotting and structuring and all sorts of things like that. They’re one of my favorite tools because you can get a pack of them for 49 cents. I prefer the unruled ones, but you do you. And to stretch that 49 cents even further, I will fold index cards in half. I don’t know if I should call it vertically or horizontally… “Hamburger style” – <laugh> if you’re an American who went through the American public school system in the eighties and nineties, and I will cut each index card in half because I write small and it feels like a waste of paper to use a whole index card for one thought. But again, that’s just me. I have my own little idiosyncrasies and that is a thing. And now let us move on to tool number four.

This is a brand new tool for me as of this year. I was in a place where I was really struggling with season two of “Girl in Space”. So I’m in the writing phase right now. Yes, still. It feels like three or four years later. I am still writing this thing, but basically I found that I hadn’t answered all of the questions that I needed to answer for myself while I was planning out season two of “Girl in Space”.

And again, when I say “planning out,” that’s a very, that’s a very loose term for me ’cause, I think you guys know, I tend to be a little bit more of a pantser than a plotter. So I’m the kind of writer that writes by the seat of my pants instead of sort of painstakingly detailing everything out. And that’s another conversation once again, that we’ll have another day, but: I didn’t know what I didn’t know. That is to say, when I was doing the pre-writing period or the planning period for “Girl in Space”. I didn’t know what I didn’t know to ask myself and the tool that I’m about to tell you about whichI should probably tell you about… So this is the “Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook” by Donald Maass, and it’s just a workbook. It’s literally a workbook.

So are the first four recommended tools that I’m talking about today some sort of notebook and or stack of paper that you use to write things on? Yes, but, but, but: for me, this workbook was extremely helpful. I think it’s going for about $25 right now, just where I’ve seen it online. And yes, it’s a little expensive, but for me it was worth the investment. So basically, this workbook is kind of here to help you, if you are in the early-to-mid stages of your project. And I know it’s called “Writing the Breakout Novel”, but I’ve been using it for writing audio dramas and it has worked really, really well. Basically, it asks you to think about a bunch of things that you might not have thought about for your novel / audio drama / memoir / whatever it is you’re writing. It’s really here to help you refine and improve your current outline or rough draft, or segment of a draft, or whatever it is you’re working from. And it sort of walks you through a series of questions that are designed to help you strengthen plot lines, increase, tension, create more character depth, et cetera. So I have to admit when I first opened it… I have a snob that lives in my brain, okay? And this snob rolled its eyes and it was like, “oh my gosh, this is really basic. This is not gonna help you.” This workbook, you know, has quotes in it from popular novels that maybe you don’t think very highly of, but I had already spent the $25 <laugh> and so I was gonna use it and get my money’s worth. And I’m really glad that I did that because it’s one of those things that you sort of get out what you put into it.

So I took it seriously. I answered the questions in essay form. I just went through and gave my all to answering these questions. And I honestly really enjoyed it. I completed the whole workbook. And basically when I was done, I had an entire new stack of ideas on index cards and ways to strengthen my story and insights on where the plot could go and ways that characters relationships could change and develop and grow. And it was just – yes, all the ideas come from your brain, but having something or someone to prompt and guide you through a series of questions, at least for me, was extremely valuable. So thank you to Kate Browning who suggested this workbook to me, I then went ahead. <laugh> I bought, uh, two more copies of the workbook for my next two projects because I wanna do it again.

If that is a big investment for you, I totally understand. You could probably get away with just buying one workbook and then doing all of the exercises in a notebook or in a journal or something so that you’re not writing in the notebook and you can then reuse it for future projects. So just an idea there, but it really was valuable and it does feel a little bit like a textbook, like a college workbook. It’s not just a workbook, there’s a lot of text. And I do suggest that you read all of the texts, even if you don’t think it is applicable to you. Because again, I think I got out of it, what I put into it. So I hope that you do too. If this is something that you decide you want to try.

Okay. Tool number five is a loose conglomerate of items. <laugh> Could I be more suspicious sounding? So basically number five is a pen loose leaf notebook, paper, and a binder. You could also say “a pen and a notebook”, “a pen and paper.” For me, this is just what I use. This could be whatever you use. And here’s the thing. And this is once again, maybe it’s very own “Write Now Podcast” episode topic, but time and frustration have both taught me that I write best when I write by hand. Do I like that? No. Does it take me a million years to write anything? Yes. But is it necessary for the way that my brain in particular works? Yes. I have discovered that I really need to tangibly feel each word out to scrape it over the paper with ink or a pencil. And this works for me because when I’m typing, I get ahead of myself, important things get missed and I end up doing double or triple or, you know, even more of the work in rewriting. And I have to kill a lot more of my darlings in that process. So for me, handwriting on paper forces me to think about the words that I’m putting down and to make sure that they work. And that they’re really what I want. Kind of like I mentioned before with the index cards and the idea notebook, handwriting on paper also gives me the space that I need to create and also to spatially process my work. Like I said earlier, a computer screen is very frustrating and limiting for me and scrolling around it just feels very, very trapping. I don’t even know if that’s a word or the right word to use there, but I’m using it. Unlike my desk and my floor, where I can like spread things out, move them around. They exist tangibly for me. And I just need that in order to write. So I know that this is not going to be a very popular one, but this is my list of the tools that I use to write and so I would be remiss if I did not include the pen and notebook paper.

Once I’m done, I will put these pieces of notebook, paper into a binder. I like the binder and loose leaf notebook paper method, because unlike a spiral bound notebook, I can add pages in. If I need to rewrite something, if I need to insert a new scene, I can reorder the pages. I can take them out and throw them away. <laugh> if I need to. And I feel like if I did that in a spiral bound notebook, I would end up tearing out pages and like taping them in, in weird ways. And then you couldn’t turn the pages of the notebook anymore. So, that’s number five.

Okay. I promise the next several do not involve paper. Okay. I promise. I know some of you are probably like, “oh my gosh, Sarah, this does not work for me.” But tool number six: for me, it is really hard to focus. And by focusing, I mostly mean shutting out distraction. I’m one of those writers where I’ll be sitting here writing and then a brain fog happens like, seriously, I have an out of body experience or I lose conscious thought or something – Next thing I know I’m on my phone, scrolling on Twitter, or I’m looking out of the window, counting the cars going by, or I’m, you know, daydreaming, something, whatever. And that’s not necessarily bad. We need space in our writing and we need space in our minds. And so sitting there daydreaming, that’s part of writing, staring out the window, probably part of writing. But for me, it gets to the place where it hampers my focus. So for me, shutting out distraction is very, very crucial and something that’s really helped me regain a little bit of focus there has been controlling my environment – specifically sound. That for me is the most distracting thing. Birds, people talking outside, lawnmowers. I don’t know if that has a connection with me being a podcaster and creating in an audio medium. I have no idea. Somebody can psychoanalyze me on that later, but I really need to be able to control my sonic environment. So what I’ll do is I’ll put my phone into do not disturb mode. Mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative>. I need to do that. And then I turn on a white noise app or a rain app. “Rainy Mood” is one, “Calm” is another one.

If you’re the kind of writer like me and white noise, or rain, or some kind of static sound balancing app is necessary for you, or if it’s just something you’d like to try, I have found that it helps me focus. It does not let any of the other sounds of life in, especially when I’m using my little earbuds with sound canceling on them or “noise canceling,” I guess it’s called. Something that I’ve enjoyed using too, is there’s a lot of different ambient background videos out on YouTube. So sometimes since I write by hand, I’ll put up one of those videos on my laptop screen while I write by hand, and just have it take up the whole screen. So I’m not tempted to use my computer there, but really it’s just the sound that helps me. So I’ll put up a little video of eight hours of like, rain on a window, and there’s like a candle in front of it. I’ll link some of these in the show notes if that’s something that you’re interested in. It’s really helped my productivity, especially regarding distraction.

Speaking of distraction, tool number seven: I’ve called this “the anti phone.” So basically this tool is not using your phone. Okay. So my phone,, for me keeps my life on track. It’s got my calendar, it’s got my email, it’s got my texts. It’s, you know, also a phone. Believe it or not, my phone has everything on it, but that also means, like we just talked, about it’s my number one source of distraction. It is the enemy of my focus. And I found that even when I’m using Do Not Disturb, I will still exit out of that brain fog I talked about earlier and just find myself on Twitter or checking Tumblr for updates, or like texting someone that I haven’t talked to in years. And I don’t even remember picking the phone up, which is a little bit scary.

So when this happens, I use the last remaining scrap of my willpower to turn on the Forest app. And so this is basically a Pomodoro timer, and we’ve talked a little bit before about the Pomodoro technique. So basically Pomodoro is, I wanna say it’s Italian for “tomato” because – I know this makes zero sense if you’re not familiar with this concept. But basically I guess in Italy, they have like kitchen timers that look like tomatoes. And so the Pomodoro technique is: you set a little tomato-shaped kitchen timer to 25 minutes, and you focus on writing for those 25 minutes. And then you set it for five minutes, and you take a break, and then you come back and you set it for 25 minutes and you focus hard on your work. And then you take another five minute break. This is called the Pomodoro technique.

And no, you do not need specifically to use a tomato-shaped physical kitchen timer to do this. You can use the timer on your, well, I wanna be very careful… The timer on your phone, but I also don’t want you to have to pick up your phone and access your phone if it’s a distraction for you. So for me, the Forest app basically uses the Pomodoro technique, and has you set a timer. So for me, I do 30 minutes instead of 25, and then sometimes I write over that if I don’t need a break yet. What it does is it plants a little digital tree and the tree is really, really cute. And if you end up using your phone and exiting the Forest app before the timer is up, the adorable little digital tree dies. And it’s like, <laugh>, this is gonna sound really silly, but like, I can’t have that happen. I need these trees to live. Like, the idea of killing a tiny, adorable digital cartoon tree in this app; it’s like anathema <laugh>. So the Forest app is basically responsible for the majority of my productive writing for the past two years it’s literally the only thing, aside from me throwing my phone down the garbage disposal, that keeps me off of social media. It keeps me off of thousands of distractions that come with having a smartphone.

This particular app was not free. So it was, I think it was $3.99 or $4 or something like that when I first downloaded it a couple years ago, for me, that was worth it. But there are also a ton of other Pomodoro apps and timers and stuff like that that you can get for free. So yes, yes – number seven is the anti-phone. So it’s the thing that turns my phone into not a phone.

All right. Number eight. I wanna talk about writing software. I know we’ve spent a lot of time on this episode already talking about how I write everything by hand, but when I am ready to edit or polish those handwritten rough drafts, I type them into a word processor. So this keeps the final draft looking professional, clean and presentable, and depending on what kind of project it is, I’ll use different programs. For prose projects, like books and creative nonfiction pieces, I like to use Google docs. It’s free. It’s easy to use. You can access it on a number of devices: your phone, your computer tablet, whatever. And it’s also available on Mac iOS and or PC / Android. I also like that multiple people can access the document live at the same time so that you don’t have to always do a Save As off of a Microsoft word document and end up with 700,000 weird drafts with different parentheses numbers at the end.

So that’s for writing prose projects. When I’m writing for audio drama or TV, I like to use, and I don’t know if it’s pronounced “kel-tics” or “cel-tics” – the basketball team really screwed me up on this one, but it’s, it’s spelled C-E -L-T-X. It’s a web-based program. So you have to have the Internet up to use it, which I don’t love because if the internet goes out, you can’t access your work. And that’s a little terrifying to me. I don’t like to be reliant on the Internet for that Basically with Celtx, there’s also a paid version. If you wanna keep using the free version, you just enter your email and hit “sign up” and then periodically click “continue using free version” when it prompts you to. This program is similar to Final Draft, which, I also have. Final Draft is kind of expensive. I wanna say it’s a couple hundred dollars. Like it’s, it’s very expensive, but you know, you can also use it offline. It’s an actual program for your computer, but basically Celtx and Final Draft will allow you to quickly type and format your script properly, which it sounds very unnecessary, but it’s has saved so much time and effort for me that it really has been worth it.

All right. Number nine: Dropbox. I back everything up constantly. This comes from a sort of learned fear from losing projects due to a hard drive crash, or a corrupted file, or a disc that ended up getting corrupted, or anything like that. It sucks. It’s really terrible to lose something that you’ve put so much of your time and self into. Those of you who have lost a project before, you know, how painful that can be. So I started using the free version of Dropbox about a million years ago when it first came out and I’m still using it today. I have a paid version and it’s been great for keeping audio and video files, especially files that are too big to store on my little computer. I keep them just saved to Dropbox and it has been fantastic. This is not an advertisement. Dropbox is not paying me to say this or endorse their service. This is just something that has been actually valuable for me as a writer and as an audio drama creator, especially.

All right, number 10, we’re winding down! Number 10 is something that I have in front of me right now. It’s not a microphone, even though that is also in front of me right now. It is a cup of coffee.

It’s funny. I think of that quote by Cory Doctorow. And if you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you’ve seen this quote before. It’s one of my favorite ones. The quote says, “write even when the world is chaotic, you don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner piece to write. You just need 10 minutes and a writing implement.” And it’s really inspiring because you know, you don’t. You don’t need to light 10 candles and have this here and that there, I know it’s really easy to get particular about your writing set up and all of that stuff. But when you think about what you basically need to write, it’s just a pen and paper or a laptop or something very simple. However, <laugh>, uh, I’m a little bit of a hypocrite or perhaps a kinder word is “paradox”, but I need coffee to write. It makes the brain go.

All right. So those are my top 10 tools for writing. Number one: a journal. Number two: idea notebook. Number three: index cards / sticky notes. Number four: “Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook” by Donald Maass. Number five: pen, loose leaf notebook paper, and a binder. Number six: a sound environment. Number seven: the anti-phone, AKA the Forest app, or some kind of Pomodoro timer method. Number eight: writing software; including Google Docs, Celtx and Final Draft. Number nine: Dropbox. And number 10: coffee.

As I said, at the very beginning of this episode, this is not a prescriptive list. I’m not saying if you use these 10 tools, you will suddenly, magically, become a writer. The only thing that can make you a writer is you sitting down or standing up to write. Do some writing. That makes you a writer.

These tools are just things that I’ve found helpful in my own process for my own weird and unique brain. I would love to hear what you consider your best or favorite or top tools for writing. I know that a lot of writers use things like Scrivener that I didn’t cover here and the Hemingway app, which I didn’t cover here. So if you have some favorite writing tools, please let me know what they are. I’m actually just – I’m really curious. And I’m looking for new things to try as well. You can let me know your thoughts and opinions over on the show notes for today’s episode out at sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. So just go out to my website and navigate to the show notes for this episode. This is episode number 146.

Special thanks in help for creating this episode go out to my wonderful, amazing patrons out on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that allows people like you to donate $1 per episode, $2 per episode, $7,000 per episode, whatever you feel like this show is worth to you. The money goes to help pay for hosting, website upkeep. It allows me to produce full transcripts to keep everything accessible to everyone. And I just really appreciate it. Special thanks go out to: Tamara K Sellman, Amanda King, Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferrara, Dennis Martin, Melissa Green, Michael Beckwith, Mike Tefft, Sarah Banham, Summer, Tiffany Joiner and Whitney McGruder. Thank you all so, so much for your kind and generous donations to keep this show ad-free and available for everyone. I appreciate it so much.

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Oh my friends, it’s been a joy sharing my top favorite writing tools with you today. Again, I know that they’re not what everyone uses, and these are not even things that I was using even a couple of years ago. So this list will continue to grow and change. Maybe in another seven years, I’ll do another update with a whole bunch of new things that I’ve learned. But until then, this has been episode 146 of the “Write Now Podcast”, the podcast that helps all writers find the time energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner. And I hope you’re taking good care of yourself.

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